When you go on a winter driving holiday in Iceland, everyone strongly advises you to download a safe driving and weather app. Conditions can be fickle and a sunny jaunt can turn into a snowbound disaster if you’re not clued in to the day’s forecast.
We learned that lesson fast when we arrived in mid-October at our camper van rental centre, and the manager refused to give us the vehicle we had booked. “It’s too windy,” he said. He pointed outside, although he hardly needed to. The rental centre was located in a forlorn industrial estate on the Reykjanes Peninsula, about an hour from Reykjavik, and we had already experienced the day’s extremely windy weather, face-first, as we trudged the 2km walk from the bus stop to the vehicle pickup point.
My girlfriend and I chose Iceland for our holiday because it seemed like a nice (friendly, cosy), yet slightly adventurous (glaciers, volcanoes) destination. Crucially, getting there involved a manageable flight of about 2½ hours from Dublin, where we live. This was important because we were travelling with our 1½-year-old son, Abe, who does not enjoy long flights. After the unforgettable disaster of our last trip to Slovenia, we knew that connecting flights were also a no-no.
The camper van idea appealed in part because it would provide a way to time Abe’s naps around driving. The plan was to spend a couple of nights in an Airbnb in Reykjavik, then hit the road in our camper for five nights. We would do an activity in the mornings, drive in the afternoons while Abe napped, and then find somewhere to park up in the evenings.
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Because Abe had recently figured out how to walk, we booked the most spacious vehicle we could find: a 7m-long Fiat Ducato. In terms of roominess, it was perfect; but as an extremely un-aerodynamic box on wheels, it was not the ideal thing to pilot through relentless crosswinds.
So, when the manager told us we couldn’t drive off into an Icelandic storm in a vehicle that looked like it was made out of billboards, we had to trust his knowledge. Instead, his staff prepared a smaller, sleeker van for us, whizzing in their handover through a nerve-racking galaxy of on-board buttons and switches: here’s the gas, here’s the battery, here’s the water tank, here’s the other battery. You concentrate hard to remember not to press the sequence of buttons that makes the vehicle explode.
For this trip we had worked out an itinerary that would take us about 500km east along Iceland’s south coast, as far as Jökulsárlón lagoon, via the celebrated “Golden Circle”. In terms of sights, this route seemed to give us the most bang for our buck (and in expensive Iceland, you spend a lot of bucks). The first leg, starting at the rental centre, would take us as far as Geysir, where the famous geothermic blowhole of the same name resides.
But this plan disintegrated after we left the rental centre and realised that driving through the teeth of a storm in fading daylight required an excruciating and unsustainable level of vigilance. So we drove the short distance to Reykjavik and parked up for the night.
The following morning presented much better conditions and we made it through the rugged Thingvellir national park, as far as Uthlid campsite, in what is known as the Golden Circle. This is a popular route that packs at least three spectacular sites – Thingvellir, the Geysir and Gullfoss Falls – within easy day-trip distance from Reykjavik.
Campsites in Iceland, especially those that remain open outside of the peak summer season, tend to offer few frills but plenty of parking spaces. Uthlid, when we arrived, gave off a sort of The Shining vibe, as if it had just cleared out for the off-season and was now deserted. Still, the hot tub behind the empty visitor reception was on. In Iceland, you get the impression that the hot tubs will be the last thing they turn off. Maybe the country’s abundant geothermal energy makes them cheaper to run. Either way, there’s a heated outdoor swimming pool and hot tub in pretty much every village, and they all open at about 6am, which is great when you have a travelling companion who tends to be awake at that time every morning.
Geysir, the world-famous erupting hot spring, is much a roadside attraction, just off Route 37. Visitors can park basically beside it and then walk (while pushing a buggy) up as it bubbles away at a cosy 100 degrees. A sign informs us that it doesn’t do much blowing these days, but that’s okay, there’s another one, Strokkur, a few metres away, that obliges every few minutes.
The next day, we visited the majestic Gullfoss Falls, or Golden Falls, where the Hvítá river cascades over a huge double drop before thundering through a 2km canyon. From here we headed south, to the coastal town of Vik. We stopped on the way in the village of Flúðir for a dip in the so-called Secret Lagoon. The Secret Lagoon, you could argue, is the thinking tourist’s Blue Lagoon – it’s certainly the frugal tourist’s choice (a go in the latter, more famous, thermal spring will cost you about €80). The secret one is a pond-sized pool dating back to 1891, when locals diverted hot water from a nearby spring into a no-frills bathing area. We lolled about here for close to an hour, marinating happily with a handful of other bathers in the 38-degree water, until a school tour of about 50 English teenagers showed up and we decided it was time to head on.
Iceland, with its population of just 380,000 feels happily uncrowded. This translates to the single-carriageway roads which never feels stressful or busy, although you do often pass – or get passed by – some vehicles that look like they’ve rolled off the set of Mad Max on Ice: mutant 4x4s with studded tyres on wheels the size of boulders frequently catch the eye.
The big attraction in the small town of Vik is the beautifully austere beach, with its black volcanic sand and moody grey waters. On the morning we arrived, a group of surfers were suiting up to shoot what must have been a YouTube documentary about improbable surf locations. For about 15 seconds we toyed with the idea of going for a swim in the clearly frigid water before deciding instead to stay in the camper and make porridge.
After that we headed east to Skaftafell national park and Jökulsárlón lagoon through the south coast’s otherworldly and uncanny volcanic landscape. We were now on Route 1, the famous Ring Road, a 1,322km national road that circles the entire country, connecting most of its towns. At Jökulsárlón we, along with what seemed like every other tourist in Iceland, stopped to watch large chunks of the vast Vatnajökull glacier float serenely towards the Atlantic Ocean. Many of them wash up downstream on the nearby beach, where they glitter like giant gemstones, earning the strand the name Diamond Beach.
It would have been tempting to continue east from here and follow the Ring Road as it looped its way around the rest of Iceland, but Jökulsárlón was the last stop for us. On the journey back to the camper van centre in Keflavik, we parked for a night at the sleepy inland town of Hvolsvollur, where the big draw is the Lava centre. This is a good place for visitors to learn about the huge column of molten rock that this country sits on, but if you have a toddler with you, you might struggle to stop them climbing all over the display models, which glow an enticing shade of red. After an early morning dip in Hvolsvollur’s exceptionally good outdoor heated swimming pool, we continued west via Thorlákshofn, a southern port town which was founded in the 1970s by the former inhabitants of a different town that was partially wiped out by a volcanic explosion.
By now the stormy weather that welcomed us to Iceland was a fading memory and we rolled back into the camper van rental centre under bright, sunny skies.
When we dropped the vehicle off, a New Zealand couple were there, preparing to embark on their own adventure – in one of the big campers which had been forbidden to us. Things had not got off to a good start for them. They didn’t know how to use the clutch, nor did they know how to put the camper into reverse. Eventually, a staff member had to take over and manoeuvre the big vehicle out of the centre and on to the road for them.
And as they juddered away into the afternoon sun, the manager looked out the window and shook his head. “There’s no way that thing is coming back in one piece,” he said. Still, at least they had nice weather for it.